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Comment by mcculley | Hacker News Reader

Keeping the limit at 140 or maybe a little longer would be fine, but it shouldn't consume characters to attach an image or URL. It's annoying that when one tweets with a URL, every character of the URL is counted, but then replaced with a shortened t.co link anyway. And because they host images themselves, they shouldn't count as characters consumed.

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Slightly off-topic, but I recommend the "Twitter Link Expander" Firefox extension that expands short links to the original URL when reading tweets, so you know where you will be clicking:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/twitter-link-...

This is for backwards compatibility with SMS (text messaging). Only the length of the t.co link is counted toward your 140 characters. Images are the same -- they are uploaded and a link is generated, so when you send a tweet over SMS the recipient can view the image.

More generally, if you think about Twitter's design decisions as preserving SMS compatibility, then a lot of strange choices make more sense.

I completely understand that SMS compatibility is a big reason for keeping the limit. I just don't think it's a good enough reason now that most users aren't using SMS or are on MMS where they have more than 160 total characters to play with.

They could provide an option to SMS users to see a truncated tweet or a URL with the complete tweet, deprecate SMS but keep it around, and not let themselves be constrained by it.

Ah! Interesting. That count of t.co URLs must have changed at some point. I see how it works now. Still, I don't think a URL should count against your character consumption at all. That is what led to URL shorteners and the damage they do to begin with.

You just taught me that Twitter has sms support. I always thought the character limit was odd. Is there a particular market they're trying to reach with that feature, because I've never seen anyone use it.

Twitter pre-dates smartphones, mobile apps and push notifications

If Twitter wants to be more welcoming to new users, they would count each @-tag as a fixed number of characters. As it is now, it's much easier to tweet at early adopters, who have very short handles. New users end up with much longer ones, and it can be difficult to have a conversation—especially if several folks are tagged.

I don't think that tagging people should count as 0, as this would encourage spamming, but I do think that all tags should count as the same number of chars, or perhaps have a ceiling on the number of chars. So it could be up to 5 chars to tag someone, and if you're tagging someone with a shorter handle then you get it for less.

This would make the platform more egalitarian—and more welcoming to newcomers.

Yeah, that... Makes a lot of sense. Always surprised me that the URL counted for the char limit.

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